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Gibson says he looks “for little odds and ends” to put into his work.They talk about Gibson’s book Neuromancer, which was his first novel, and as McCaffrey says is filled with rock and roll images. McCaffrey says it reminded him of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Gibson says he was excited by the “surreal” about Hammett’s work. He heard about computer viruses from an “ex-WAC” who talked about someone having to come in to “wipe” unwanted programs. “It wasn’t until the book came out that I actually met people who knew what that was,” adding, “I was able to romanticize” computers. Some reviewers used terms like “notional space” that he used in his book Court Zero. They discuss revision. Gibson says computers are “the dominant scientific metaphor of our age,” as the Freudian metaphor was steam engines. He tries to “minimize the input,” worrying about “information sickness.” He talks about cyberpunk as a “marketing category,” and says, “I feel like it trivializes what I do.” They discuss the relationship among lying and convincing people that he knows what he is talking about and fiction, and Gibson talks about reading Burroughs. They discuss artificial intelligence and the AI “trope” in science fiction. Gibson talks about voodoo as a Haitian religion, and how it might figure into his work in progress (the third in the “Sprawl trilogy,” Mona Lisa Overdrive). Gibson talks about his childhood. He arrived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1968 and lived in a community of Americans. He describes meeting John Shirley at a science fiction conference and how he described himself as a writer when he was not. They talk about his work in progress Mona Lisa Overdrive and about the East Village, New York: “If I lived in a place like that I’d write about unicorns.” Gibson mentions several non-literary influences on Neuromancer including Lou Reed, television and the film Escape From New York. The interview concludes with Gibson discussing his use of Japan in the novel. An edited version of this interview appears on page 130 to 150 of Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery, 1990, University of Illinois Press and on pages 24 to 46 of Conversations with William Gibson, ed. Patrick A. Smith, 2014, University Press of Mississippi.